The Ignominious End of Our War in Afghanistan

The ignominious end of the War in Afghanistan ought to be the last nail in America's coffin on the world stage. It won't be -- and for us that should be the greatest lesson coming out of this tragic debacle. It won't be the lesson most needed by us, because we will remain blind to what we are really doing throughout the world just as we remained blind after the truth came out about Vietnam and Iraq. And that because we have never been educated well, and haven't been reading anything but mainstream news sources, if even that. They feed us news that comes well seasoned with propaganda to reinforce seeing the news in a strictly orthodox way. We must never be permitted to even perceive that there is, and since the end of World War II always has been, an American Empire.

In his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama said that "our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint." Think Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan," One would surely think, with good reason, that the Pentagon Papers (published in 1971) had taught us all we needed to know about how extensively the government lies, and that what it revealed was truly explosive news and important history, as important for students and everyone to know about as the Battle of Bunker Hill. Even after a half-century of further revelations about the war crimes we perpetrated in Vietnam, that history lesson and public knowledge of it is marginalized both in the media and in the schools.

Each and every president starting with Eisenhower has lied to the American people and the world about our foreign policy and what we are really doing throughout the world, especially militarily, and relying on the massive subterfuge of 9/11, the last three presidents have exceeded all of the previous ones in doing that. Two years ago, the Washington Post published "The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war", including documents found to "contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting." Those documents confirmed that the American public is now being lied to by its government just as the Pentagon Papers confirmed a half-century ago. Biden joined them, notably by insisting that the Afghan government could sustain itself, and denying that our intelligence agencies predicted its likely collapse. And just last month, he told us that there was no parallel between the situation in Afghanistan and that of Vietnam in 1975.

After 9/11, we had every good reason to seek out Osama bin-Laden for prosecution for crimes against humanity in an international court, and a federal court had already indicted him in 1998 for 2 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa, but instead of negotiating with the Taliban who were willing to extradite him at the time, we invaded Afghanistan and murdered bin-Laden. And we hid the fact that 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, and not one from Afghanistan. Haven't you read that in all of our news media?

The major media are complicit in spreading propaganda when they go to the architects of war -- the intelligence agencies and the military -- for assessments of the international crises those agencies create. Knowledge of the truth must overcome public ignorance of our true role throughout the world, and the public must obtain that knowledge in the major media. The media have learned of government duplicity and obtained truth that they could print thanks to whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Ed Snowden and Daniel Hale. Has the public asked why they had to learn about the truth from whistleblowers? The public should have learned to revere their contributions to what remains of our democracy, but the government has tried to tar them as traitors. And no one has so enraged the establishment by so conscientiously revealing the truth about our war crimes as Julian Assange who is being persecuted by us and by our subservient allies before likely being prosecuted in a U.S. court.

Recently, we have come to see how racist our politics can be, but when might we be able to see how racist our exceptionalist foreign policy doctrines are? We've been told that we are involved in a War on Terror, but never that we are the terrorists. The establishment keeps much of the news hidden from public view because if the public truly saw and understood it, they would come to see all of the evil resulting from the promulgation of American imperial hegemony. Suppose everyone understood that our foreign policy led us to engage in and to support mass slaughter on a weekly basis over the course of the last 20 years? No, our national blindness must continue if America is to continue as a power on the world stage.

What is missing is a healthy skepticism about the news we get. Like Jefferson, I believe that a democracy depends on a well educated and well informed public, better able to discriminate more intelligently among news sources. One of the problems in doing this is overcoming the most conservative elected officials and groups who have set out to destroy public education. I was fortunate to have gotten a fine public education in NYC in the 1950s, at Stuyvesant H.S. and NYU, and I started reading incisively truthful news and commentary in The Atlantic, The Village Voice, and The New York Review of Books as soon as I was in college. When I finished at NYU and began teaching philosophy, I found it important to advise students about where to find the news needed to maintain the warranty on their education. Today, I often do the same for colleagues in public health.

The right way to begin is with the history, replete with accounts of our atrocities as a nation, that is missing in our textbooks, so I like to go to Howard Zinn to begin filling it in. The Times, the Post and the Guardian are not bad for keeping up with world news developments, but for a fuller understanding of the significance of those developments, I recommend the World Socialist Web Site, Information Clearing House , Counterpunch, The Conversation, TomDispatch, Consortium News, Popular Resistance, Buzzf lash and Democracy Now.

The "news" we are fed by the plutocratic oligarchs in control of the country is made tasty for us, and we take to it like dessert. We become addicted to it along with our other opiates, religion and patriotism. Faith in God and faith in America have much in common, delusions that assure willing obedience to our role of believing and doing what we are told. How long will most of us go on seeing only the news we are allowed to see, secure in our blindness and sure that we are still the greatest nation on earth? What we always fail to see is what it tells us about ourselves.

What's left of my lifelong optimism is now vested in the hope that good sources of news and analysis like those I listed above will grow their audiences to include more of the general public. If that continues, the major media may be forced to present more of the real news long censored by our government agencies. That has been occurring in the Times, the Post and the Guardian for some time now, and publication of The Afghanistan Papers by the Post and The 1619 Project by the Times are very encouraging signs. We now need to do less reading between the lines, seeing whole books there, than we used to do. I hope that the better educated of our people increase their activism in demanding this kind of news to counter the moves by some of our politicians to control our thinking through censorship of our public schools, universities and libraries. To improve our world, we must first improve our knowledge of it. Education is the key to the progressive change we seek for our nation.

I am encouraged in reading in a recent AP poll that most of the country recently came to believe that the War in Afghanistan was not worth pursuing. Hopefully, they are finding better than the usual mainstream sources and social media for their news. If the end of the War in Afghanistan is the beginning of a true public awakening, one that represents our imperial decline, it may one day be judged less as ignominious than simply as long overdue. We can move closer to that day by passing the bill Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.) (the only member of Congress who voted against the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, AUMF), has submitted to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that started our 20-year war in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. If we then pass her bill to cut 50% of the military budget, we will have shown that we have learned our costly lesson.

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